If Bill Clinton and Al Gore couldn’t do it, then no one can. A Leftist Facebook friend posted an article from The Hill with a lede saying that Donald Trump “floats rolling back food safety regulations.” The implication, obviously, is that in Trump’s America, we’re all going to die from salmonella and e. Coli. Read through to the end, though, and you discover that Trump is instead making a remarkably sensible suggestion:

Trump’s economic policy plan also calls for “an immediate halt to new federal regulations and a very thorough agency-level review of previous regulations to see which need to be scrapped.”

Agencies would be required to list all regulations and rank them in terms of their contribution to growth, health and safety. The goal, Trump said, would be to strengthen the rules that are useful and reduce the rules that harm the economy.

One of my Leftist Facebook friends stopped with the lede, of course, and envisioned our nation drowning in fecal matter emanating from food-poisoned Americans. In a comment, I quoted the above language and suggested that it was a good idea to control regulations, which are so big no one can know them, are often non-effective, are frequently inconsistent with each other, and are too often quasi-legislation.

To seal it for this Leftist, I reminded him that Bill Clinton had assigned Al Gore this very task of cutting back on America’s burgeoning regulations, although it never came to anything. And that’s when my Facebook friend essentially said “Well, if Al Gore and Bill Clinton couldn’t do it, then no one can. After all, Trump has never been a politician, and he’s really stupid, so what does he know?”

My reply was that voters may be hoping that it’s an advantage that Trump hasn’t been a politician. He may have out-of-the-box (i.e., out-of-D.C.) ideas that actually work. The response? A reiteration that Trump is stupid. (Has there ever been a Republican candidate, no matter how successful and brilliant, whom the Left hasn’t called stupid? I don’t think so. It’s a tired idea.)

Agencies must be reined in. Exhibit A in the “agencies need to be cut back and God willing Trump is the man to do it” category is the fact that the FBI thinks it is more important than Congress is. So it was that Jason Chaffetz had to explain to the acting FBI chair that, no, Congress gets to have all of the notes from Hillary’s FBI interview — and then serves him, then and there, with a subpoena.

The migraine is fading, helped by a surprise three-hour nap, and my energy is returning. Yay!!! Now I can blog:

Was losing good for Ted Cruz? I was really in it to win it for Ted Cruz. I continue to think he is the most principled conservative in American politics. But was that principled stand his Achilles heel? Peter Weber argues that, if nominated, Ted Cruz had only two choices, neither good: Be principled and lose, or abandon his principles . . . and still lose, because then he wouldn’t be Ted Cruz.

Me? I still would have preferred Ted Cruz who actually is what Trump pretends to be — a game changer destroying the entrenched Washington way of doing things.

The empty Palestinian museum is an apt metaphor for the Palestinian cause. Daniel Greenfield finds a useful metaphor in the expensive, empty building meant to commemorate the “Palestinian” people:

This post’s title, of course, is facetious. Dennis Prager is entirely unaware of my blog (and, no, I’m not complaining about that fact). I have noticed over the years, though, that Prager will often write a post that says what I had earlier blogged about, although he always says it better than I did (which is why he gets paid the biggish bucks). The latest example is Prager’s article stating that the scariest aspect of Donald Trump’s elevation in the Republican Party reflects the fact that Americans no longer understand either the nature of America or the nature of conservativism. They have hot-button issues, but no broad conservative principles.

Senator Ted Cruz’s supporters are mounting an effort to seize control of the Republican platform and the rules governing the party’s July convention, the first indication that Mr. Cruz will not simply hand his delegates over to Donald J. Trump.

In an email sent Sunday to pro-Cruz convention delegates, a top aide to the Texas senator wrote that it was “still possible to advance a conservative agenda at the convention.”

“To do that, it is imperative that we fill the Rules and Platform Committees with strong conservative voices like yours,” wrote Ken Cuccinelli, who was the campaign’s former delegate wrangler and a former attorney general of Virginia. “That means you need to come to the national convention and support others in coming, too!”

Mr. Cruz is planning a Monday evening conference call where, as Mr. Cuccinelli writes, Mr. Cruz’s former officials plan to “discuss what we can do at the convention to protect against liberal changes to our platform, and how we can right the wrongs in the rules from 2012!”

The “wrongs” Mr. Cuccinelli was referring to are the changes pushed through at the last convention by supporters of Mitt Romney that would have made it harder for a candidate’s name to be placed in nomination.

But Mr. Cruz’s supporters and other conservative activists are also deeply concerned about Mr. Trump’s general election agenda, and want to ensure that he does not alter the party’s platform. Since locking up the nomination last week, Mr. Trump has made clear he intends to run a populist campaign against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, indicating he is open to higher taxes and an increase in the minimum wage.

[snip]

But Mr. Cuccinelli said Mr. Cruz, who has been silent since withdrawing from the race last Tuesday, had no intention of trying to rewrite convention rules in an effort to deny Mr. Trump the nomination.

“It’s important that this not appear as though we are pulling at stunt at this convention,” he said, adding that the goal is to advocate for policies preferred by the sort of hard-line conservatives who backed Mr. Cruz’s campaign.

“This is about protecting movement conservatism,” he said, pointing to party planks on abortion and saying the delegates should consider language regarding transgender bathroom access.

“We want to have girls go in girls’ bathrooms,” he said, highlighting an issue on which Mr. Trump has broken with social conservatives by supporting the rights of transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice.

Read the rest here. As I read this, Ted Cruz is doing what he’s always promised to do: Try his best to protect constitutional conservativism in the United States of America. A Trump presidency would certainly be more palatable if he were constrained to follow core conservative ideas. (Although, thinking about it, it’s hard to imagine anything constraining Trump.)

I found this poster on the Facebook page of a hardcore Progressive. The Leftists know what’s really at stake in this election. So should we:

While I don’t necessarily expect Trump to nominate conservative or even good judges, I know that Hillary or Bernie will pick hardcore Leftist judges who view the Constitution as an enemy that must be destroyed. My goal in November 2016 is to save as much as possible of the American fabric until a true constitutional conservative candidate – Ted Cruz! – comes along in 2020 or 2024 and begins the slow process of rebuilding a free America.

Having thought about it a lot, I’m about to commit what many will believe is heresy: I believe conservatives should suck it up and vote for Trump so as to avoid a hard Left presidency. Trying to save the Republican party at this juncture is an intellectual and practical dead-end, akin to doing CPR on a pulse-free heart attack victim even as the sarin gas is leaking under the door, through the keyhole, and over the transom.

As a predicate to my argument, let me say two things. First, the more I know of Trump as a person, the less I like him. He is rude, crude, coarse, mean, and vicious. I think that he speaks to everything that is low in the human condition. Second, I deeply respect those who are stating a principled opposition to a Trump presidency, men such as David French, George Will, and Ben Sasse.

Respecting them, though, doesn’t mean that I think these men, and other like-minded people, are making the right call. From where I sit, the mere fact that Donald Trump was nominated means that the Republican Party is already dead. We can drag it around for a bit, and dress it up nicely, but it’s still a rotting corpse and one that cannot be resuscitated.

Perhaps my different take comes about because, unlike French, Will, Sasse, or other prominent members of the #NeverTrump crowd, I am not a lifetime Republican. The party doesn’t hold any emotional resonance for me. I wasn’t there intellectually during the glory days of Eisenhower or Reagan. I came to conservativism at the beginning of the 21st century by dint of very hard intellectual work.

Reaching conservativism meant that, after a lifetime of unthinkingly checking the boxes next to every Democrat candidates’ name, I had finally figured out that no Democrat policies worked to achieve the promised goals — and, indeed, that all of these policies were counterproductive:

My take on the decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 in place of Andrew Jackson? I find all this change and revisionism both silly and expensive but, having said that, here’s my position: They’re replacing the racist, slave-supporting, Indian-killing founder of the Democrat party with a gun-toting, Republican black woman — what’s to dislike? I think it’s great. And now on to the collected news of the day.

Blame Democrats for today’s nasty politics. Politics has always been a rough-and-tumble business. After all, the people playing aren’t just winning cupcakes; they’re winning power. Nevertheless, for most of America’s history, there’s been a tacit agreement to conduct politics in a civil manner — fight hard, but attack your opponent’s politics, not his person. This year, that unwritten rule has vanished. One can point fingers at specifically nasty politicians, but the real story isn’t that nasty people do nasty things; instead, it’s that the American public is willing to accept that behavior. Andrew Klavan blames the Left for this cultural degradation:

As a proud right-winger, I’m appalled and disgusted by Donald Trump. Nonetheless, I feel a certain schadenfreudean glee at watching leftists reel in horror at his unbridled incivility. They truly don’t seem to realize: he is only the loud and manifest avatar of their own silent and invisible nastiness. In a veiled reference to Trump at a recent lunch on Capitol Hill, President Obama declared he was “dismayed” at the “vulgar and divisive rhetoric” being heard on the campaign trail. “In America, there is no law that says we have to be nice to each other, or courteous, or treat each other with respect,” the president said. “But there are norms. There are customs.”

Are there? When I hear this sort of thing from Obama and his fellow leftists, what I wonder is: Have they not listened to themselves for the past 50 years? Do they really have no idea how vicious, how low, how cruel, and how dishonest their attacks on the Right have been?

No, they haven’t; and, no, they don’t. The Democrat-monopolized media, which explodes with rage at any minor unmannerliness on the right, falls so silent at the Left’s almost ceaseless acrimony that leftists are never forced to confront what despicable little Trumps they often are.

American immobility. I’ve commented multiple times about the fact that Americans are less willing to relocate than they once were. The entire essence of America for several hundred years was people’s willingness to leave their homes, whether in the old country or the new, and to head south, east, north, or west in search of better opportunities.

Today, though, the combination of being weighted down by possessions (even the poor today own more than all but the rich owned in the past) and having welfare to turn to (no matter how minimal that welfare is) means that people in economically dead areas can stick around. It’s not a nice life, but it’s the life they know, and they can always make themselves feel better about things with a bit of meth or heroin.

Kevin Williamson got a lot of flak for saying that we as a nation need to stop expending energy and money on dying communities and should, instead, focus on the vital communities. Obviously, I agree. Now, Williamson, in the face of that flak, has doubled down and I still agree:

My answer is that if there’s nothing for you in Garbutt but penury, dysfunction, and addiction, then get the hell out. If that means that communities in upstate New York or eastern Kentucky or west Texas die, so what? If that’s all they have to offer, then they have it coming.

Mixed in with that common sense you’ll find some hard-hitting attacks on those who challenged Williamson. And I still agree with him.

The bottom line is that,while dying towns are sad and forcing people to leave their roots is sad too, at a societal level, that’s not a reason to keep functionally dead towns on taxpayer-funded life support.

(Incidentally, the same goes for Europe, which in its effort to preserve its past has calcified, making it less of a charming place, and more of a bizarre and frequently unpleasant place. I totally understood what Robert Avrech’s friend was talking about when he said that Eastern Europe, even without the Soviets, is “oppressive.”)

In the old days, when a political candidate had a good campaign commercial, s/he would spend money to get it on TV. Then came DVRs, which allow people to skip commercials (I know that I haven’t watched one on television in at least a decade).

So how do political candidates get their good commercials out? Through you, the people. It’s up to those who believe in a commercial’s message to help make it go viral.

I think the video below is a really good campaign commercial. If you support Ted Cruz, I suggest you too become part of the commercial’s spread through the non-traditional, people-centric means, such as email and social media:

My little lady is paying the IRS today, which is why she looks so sad.

Yes, it’s tax day, and what better day could there be to talk about all the distressing, expensive, and scary foolishness in the world?

Ripping off taxpayers with climate change craziness. Today has been a “suffer the climate change” day for me, so it’s appropriate to open with a riff about California’s infamous — and incredibly expensive — high-speed train to nowhere. The Independent Institute, a great libertarian think-tank located right here in the Bay Area, has this to say:

California’s “bullet train” is nowhere near completion, but already the high-speed rail system is taking the state’s voters and taxpayers for a ride. The gulf between the glowing promise and the gloomy reality is gargantuan. For this reason, the agency that manages the voter-approved project, which lacks transparency but not arrogance, has just won the California Golden Fleece Award, a prize Independent Institute gives each quarter to a state or local agency, official, or program guilty of egregiously fleecing taxpayers, consumers, and/or businesses.

[snip]

When voters approved a $9.95 billion bond measure in 2008 to help fund a high-speed bullet train connecting the San Francisco Bay Area with Southern California, they were promised nonstop service from S.F. to L.A. in 2 hours and 40 minutes, at a total cost of $45 billion—all without taxpayer subsidies. Since then the California High-Speed Rail Authority has planned on dropping nonstop service, changing to non-dedicated tracks, and raising the travel time to almost four hours—changes that would cut ridership and revenue while raising total costs, now estimated at $64 billion.

And while I’m on the subject of climate change. A federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a bunch of kids can continue their climate change lawsuit against the United States government and the Fossil Fuel Industry. If this insanity is not nipped in the bud, the Fossil Fuel Industry will be bankrupted, and all of us will be re-living the wonders of the pre-industrial era, complete with windmill power, Hobbesian mass starvation, and life expectancies in the 30s.

The gift of an “imperfect” child. This segment probably deserves its own post, but I’ll try to pack it in here. I was in a restaurant the other day and saw something one never sees any more in Marin, or anywhere in the Bay Area for that matter: a young child who had clearly been born with Down Syndrome.

There are certainly older people around with Down Syndrome. That the young people are missing isn’t because they’re being cured; it’s because, thanks to amniocentesis testing, they’re being destroyed in utero.

Ever since Sen. Cruz used the phrase “New York values” during a Republican debate, I’ve been reading that large numbers of New York Republicans who support Trump are doing so because they cannot get over the psychic pain flowing from Ted Cruz’s statement. I cannot believe that this is true.

That is, I don’t believe that New York Republicans have morphed into the same type of special snowflake now occupying college campuses throughout America. Indeed, if that delicate sensibility characterizes the once stalwart conservative movement, our nation is in dire shape and cannot be saved.

Here’s what I think is happening: Those people who claim both to be Republicans and to have been so damaged by Ted Cruz’s words that they must vote Trump are lying. These people are either Democrats who are messing with conservatives or they are Trump supporters who are embarrassed to admit that they affirmatively embrace Trump and, instead, find it less embarrassing to blame Cruz’s words for a purely political decision.

New Yorkers are accounted to be some of the sharpest people in America. Whether they hail from the Big Apple or the parts upstate, we know that they talk fast, think fast, and pride themselves on their pragmatism. In other words, they are people who can distinguish a short-hand rhetorical device from an actual insult.

In regards to that short-hand rhetorical device. true conservatives fully understand what Sen. Cruz meant with those words. He didn’t mean the New Yorkers who rallied together for 9/11. Instead, he meant:

The latest polls show Trump up again and Cruz down. I don’t care. As we’ve discovered in the last few elections, polls no longer have much value today. Sure, some prove to be right at the end of the day, but that seems to be due more to random luck than to a successful polling strategy. Add to that the crude nature of push polls and, as I said, I’m ignoring the polls.

Of course, since I’m not studying polls, I need to do something else with my time. Watching this cute, clever Star Wars riff on Cruz’s campaign is a good way to spend 3 minutes. I’m still smiling:

One of the things about a hard-fought primary is that it can be seen as a preview of coming attractions. You can really get the measure of a person when you watch that person vying for the nomination, and you can start thinking about what kind of candidate that person will be in the general election — and what kind of president that person will be too. I know which candidate I prefer:

Am I the only one who finds this sentence incredibly disturbing? The sentence comes from an article about Gloria Vanderbilt’s life and, more specifically, her sex life, which is the subject of a new documentary. The person behind the documentary is Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt’s son, and noted gay TV personality who used the grotesque phrase “tea baggers,” which refers to a gay oral sex practice, to describe those Americans who came together against big government in the Tea Party.

Oh! You want to know what the sentence is, don’t you? This is the sentence: “Anderson loved hearing about his mother’s sex life but felt embarrassed that it was more interesting than his own.” We live in a deeply sick society.

As Trump’s momentum slows, Cruz’s organization starts to pay off.It’s instructive to look at Trump’s fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants campaign, versus Cruz’s, which is simultaneously methodical and agile. When it comes to White House management, I prefer the latter to the former.

The real Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders sat down with The New York Daily News and was utterly appalling. Whether he was out-Hamasing Hamas when it came to slandering Israel, or revealing that he had idea how to effectuate his campaign promises (free everything; destroy banks!), Bernie was an idiot, and a mean one at that. The interview was especially illuminating, because it revealed who Bernie really is: Your horrible stoner college roommate.

Politicized AGs try to stifle dissent. Both David French and the Independent Sentinel look at the Left’s latest, and very dangerous, constitutional assault: persecuting speech through the medium of defending “climate change.”

If there were a speed-blogging competition, my goal would be to win it with this round-up post. I’d meant to blog at length and at leisure today, but life caught up, including a glitch with the bank, which lost the signatures that would enable me to liquidate my mother’s trust. Aaargh! Now I have to go through probate. Aaargh! Aaargh!

Thomas Sowell agrees with me that Obama is a classic fascist. “What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands.”

Obama lied about every aspect of Obamacare.No, really, he did. Every one of the promises he made to public has proven false.

“How hard is it to understand that radical Islamist jihadis have declared war on the West?In simple English this means: they will find you and kill you wherever and whenever they can.”

Da Nile isn’t just a river in Egypt. It’s also a state of mind in Europe, which refuses to acknowledge, despite the Islamists’ best efforts, that there’s a war going on.

England is a dhimmi nation that sold out its youth. In Peter McLoughlin’s Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, he tells precisely how Britain’s dhimmi-fied laws, which were directly intended to silence any criticism of Islam or Muslims, resulted in England officially turning her children over to Muslim pedophiles. Janet Levy reviews the book and it’s a horrifying tale of Britain’s attacks on girls and their families for attempting to get protection and redress.

Obama’s administration isn’t in denial; it just lies. If you didn’t already read or hear about it, when the French President acknowledged the Islamic aspect of the terrorism ripping apart bits and pieces of Europe, the White House, in true Stalin fashion, erased those words from Hollande’s speech.

Islam and crime. You’re not imagining that prisons are incubators for Islamism. An expert says that violent prisoners are ripe for any type of extremist ideology. My cousin, the former prisoner minister, understands that Islam is a particularly attractive belief system:

It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they remain the angry judgmental vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.

Andrew Klavan likes Ted Cruz. Klavan lists Cruz’s objective accomplishments and abilities, likes what he sees, and struggles to understand how people can say Cruz — a lifelong constitutional conservative — is no different from Trump — a sort-of conservative as of last July. I agree with Klavan, of course.

Back in 2008, I thought to myself “The new internet media, when combined with existing conservative talk shows and Fox news, will be what finally breaks through the old media’s stranglehold on information in America. Old media is — thank God — dying.” Old media got Barack Obama elected president.

Back in 2012, I thought to myself “For the past four years, the new-ish internet media has worked hard to get out to the public the news that the dinosaur media, concerned primarily with protecting Obama’s reputation, refuses to print. The internet hasn’t proven as powerful a force as I had hoped, but these stories ought to be enough to break through the old media’s stranglehold, enabling a serious challenge to Obama’s corrupt, inept, and unconstitutional time in office.” Old media destroyed Romney and got Barack Obama elected president.

In 2015, I thought to myself, “This is it. We’ve got an extraordinary selection of candidates. The public is tired of the direction the country has taken, and the Democrats have managed to summon up only a corrupt old white lady, a white nonentity from Virginia, and an old white Communist. The dinosaur media will find it impossible to elevate Hillary over the amazing Republican line-up.” The dinosaur media, with unprecedented help from Fox, gave Trump at least 25 times more coverage than the other candidates, amounting to an incalculably valuable in-kind donation. The result was a Republican candidate that the majority of America, including vast numbers of people to the right of center, wouldn’t vote for if their lives depended on it. In other words, the old media — with Fox’s help — got Trump nominated as the unelectable Republican candidate. Next, with help from Democrat super-delegates, the media will guarantee Hillary’s nomination and election (and no, she will not be indicted).